Mountains Are Born and So Are We
I’ve learned even rock is easily shaped. Hills are made, great blemishes breaking across a tan body, ways of saying we’re under pressure. These days one season slips under another. The sky is always just sky, is the color of your bedroom wall. I’ve been big. I’ve been small as the pebble beneath your shoe—you, the world, the we—all this language laid out into land between us. The youngest mountains are the tallest, all this hurt not building but breaking. Take this morning: driving beneath a bridge and watching a bird hide in a high dark corner. I imagine the nest, an egg and all the light it doesn’t know. I see the gravel I’m dredging beneath these tires and imagine myself again on the mountains with some ridgetop chestnut oak and this nest snug in a high branch. When the egg breaks and the bird flies, I watch the light break with it.
Adam D. Weeks has a BA in Creative Writing from Salisbury University and currently lives in Baltimore. He is the social media manager for The Shore and a founding editor of Beaver Magazine. He won the 2022 Third Wednesday Poetry Contest, has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, and has poetry published or forthcoming in Fugue, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.